Data Center Links

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

OneNeck IT Solutionsannounced a U.S. Patent for a "Temperature-Humidity Monitoring Assembly for Closed Server Cabinet". Attaching on the inside of a data center cabinet door the patented sensor is fully controlled from outside of the cabinet and a motor and belt-driven rail assmbly unit incrementally raises the sensor until it reaches the top of the cabinet. After the process is completed a color coded heat-map is generated for the scanned cabinet.

“With pinpoint accuracy, the heat-map reveals any and all hot spots,” said Koch. “Equipped with this information, our facilities technicians can quickly and efficiently make the necessary adjustments to improve overall air flow. Bottom-line, this unique monitoring device can aid our clients in managing their internal rack, cable placement and airflows, thus preventing overheating, early burn-out or, even worse, downtime.”

With input and assistance from parent company Telephone and Data Systems, OneNeck was provided the resources to pursue its first patent, which was issued on December 12, 2017.

OneNeck also announced that it was named to the CRN 2018 Managed Service Provide (MSP) 500 Elite 150 list. The Elite 150 list recognizes large, data center-focused MSPs with a strong mix of on-premises and off-premises services.

OneNeck operates top-tier data centers around the U.S. and provides a range of hybrid IT, colocation, enterprise application management, managed and cloud services.

Monday, February 05, 2018

Intel's Industrial-Scale data center. Seeking Alpha has a really interesting article on how Intel has revealed a lot of patent applications recently - around its data center vision: with persistent memory and 'sled architectures'. "The architecture is centered on disaggregated processor, memory and storage, all connected by photonics."

I knew there would be some increased M&A activity in 2018, but wow....

Cisco acquires BroadSoft. Cisco announced it is acquiring BroadSoft for $1.9 billion. With approvals from the board at each company Cisco will add the Broadsoft collaboration solutions to its Unified Communications Technology group, under VP and General manager Tom Puorro.

Red Hat acquires CoreOS. Red Hat announced it has acquired CoreOS for $250 million. CoreOS is also known for helping to drive many of the open source innovations that are at the heart of containerized applications, including Kubernetes, Container Linux and etcd, the distributed data store for Kubernetes.

SAP acquires CallidusCloud. SAP announced it will acquire CallidusCloud for $2.4 billion. CallidusCloud offers a full suite of sales performance management (SPM) and configure-price-quote (CPQ) solutions.

INAP to acquire SingleHop. INAP announced it is acquiring managed hosting and IaaS provider SingleHop for $132 million. Single Hop's cofounder and CEO Zak Boca noted "SingleHop’s innovative approach to IaaS and the delivery of managed services combined with INAP’s global data center and network presence will give clients a one-stop shop for their IT needs. This is a strong combination that I’m very excited to be a part of. I look forward to transitioning to become the Chief Marketing Officer of INAP.

Apptio acquires Digital Fuel. SaaS based Technology Business Management company Apptio announced it is acquiring Digital Fuel for $42.5 million. Digital Fuel was owned by Skyview Capital, who bought the company from VMware.

IBM's Blockchain solution for global payments. IBM announced a new blockchain banking solution that will, with partners Stellar.org and KlickEx Group improve the speed in which banks both clear and settle payment transactions on a single network in near real time. IBM says the solution is run from the IBM Blockchain Platform on Hyperledger Fabric and that they will continue to advance the solution with the goal of expanding capabilities in order to support central bank-issued digital currencies, securities, bonds and structured financial assets.

Arm launches security framework IoT at scale. At the annual Arm TechCon conference this year Arm introduced a common industry framework for building secure connected devices, called Platform Security Architecture (PSA). The company said PSA will deliver representative IoT threat models and security analyses, hardware and firmware architecture specs, and a reference open source implementation of the firmware specification called Trusted Firmware-M.

Cisco acquires Perspica. Cisco announced that it is acquiring machine learning-driven operations analytics firm Perspica for an undisclosed amount. Cisco will fold the company staff into AppDynamics, which it purchased earlier in the year for $3.7 billion.

Intel doubles down with $60M on startups. At its annual conference Intel Capital revealed 19 new investments in startups, totaling more than $60 million. Intel Capital's Wendell Brooks focused on the data explosion, noting that "by 2020, every autonomous vehicle on the road will create 4TB of data per day. A million self-driving cars will create the same amount of data every day as 3 billion people. Company investments in startups were from all over the world and included such companies as Trace, Bossa Nova Robotics, Horizon Robotics, Echo Pixel, TileDB, LeapMind and AdHawk Microsystems.

U.S. warns about attacks on energy, industrial firms. This seems almost like a template announcement... that has happened, and will probably keep happening. The U.S. government issued a public warning last week that hackers are targeting energy and industrial firms. Homeland Security warned that nuclear, energy, aviation, water and critical manufacturing industries have been targeted along with government entities in attacks dating back to at least May.

Thursday, September 21, 2017

Toshiba sells Flash Memory Chip Unit for $18 Billion. The bidding seems to be over, as Bloomberg reports that a group led by Bain Capital has acquired the chip unit from Toshiba for 2 trillion yen ($18 billion). The Bain consortium includes backing from Toshiba, as well as Japanese and other overseas companies. It was noted that financial support was added from Apple, Dell, SK Hynix and Japan's Hoya Corp.

Vexata launches with $54 million venture funding. After years in stealth Silicon Valley company Vexata launched, backed with $54 million from Mayfield, Intel Capital, Lightspeed Ventures and Redline Capital. The company also announced its Active Data Fabric, a software-defined all-solid-state data storage infrastructure that enables extreme performance at scale for Tier 1 applications in enterprise or cloud data centers.

Cray 'Theta' Supercomputer used to map brain function. What do you use to face such a daunting task as mapping connections of 100 billion neurons with 100 trillion connections? Call on the Intel-Cray 9.65 petaflops supercomputer housed at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. With tera and petabyte scale datasets the Theta supercomputer along with an advanced software platform utilizes data mining, graph analytics and machine learning to meet the challenge. Very cool stuff.

TigerGraph nets $31 million. Graph database startup TigerGraph (formerly GraphSQL) announced its first product Tuesday, and a new $31 million Series A funding round. The company says it has "built the first native parallel graph databased platform using proprietary technology that yields performance up to 100 fold compared with other graph platforms."

Comcast acquires Stringify. Comcast has acquired IoT automation service company Stringify. Stringify has been named an IoT company to watch, and I'm not sure if this is a story for the data center, other than I can't help to think there is something making this deal significant... at the intersection of content and things.... edge... ?

IBM claims top spot for Blockchain technology. A Juniper Research study ranked IBM as the number one player in blockchain technology, leaving Microsoft and Accenture trailing in second and third places respectively. Customer project stories for blockchain with IBM include Maersk, London Stock Exchange, and AIG.

Thursday, August 24, 2017

Apple to build data center in Iowa. The Des Moines Register reports that Apple will build a data center in Waukee, Iowa, a suburb of Des Moines. Following large data center builds from Microsoft and Facebook in the Des Moines area, and Google in Council Bluffs, Apple will fulfill project 'Morgan' in a newly annexed portion of Waukee. My thoughts? Smart move by Apple (Iowa=awesome location), data center hub in the making (enormous build-outs by Microsoft, Facebook and Google in Iowa), and good for Waukee (there is already another totally awesome data center in town). #iowa #iowabrag

Druva nets $80 Million Funding round. Cloud data and protection management company Druva announced $80 million of growth equity funding Tuesday, bringing their total raised to around $200 million. Funding was led by Riverwood Capital, with participation from Sequoia Capital India, Nexus Venture Partners, Tenaya Capital and most other existing venture investors. Druva said they will use the funds to "dramatically accelerate research and development, expand go-to-market efforts worldwide, and lead the industry in redefining how enterprises protect, manage, and use their data."

Microsoft Acquires Cycle Computing. Microsoft announced it is acquiring Cycle Computing, a leader in HPC cloud computing orchestration. Microsoft says it will integrate the Big Computing capabilities from the CycleCloud product into Azure.

Microsoft launches Brainwave for real-time AI. At the 2017 Hot Chips Symposium in Cupertino Microsoft announced Project Brainwave, a new deep learning acceleration platform. Leveraging a large FPGA infrastructure inside of Microsoft, the new platform is built with three main layers: a high performance, distributed system architecture, a hardware DNN (deep neural network) engine synthesized onto FPGAs, and a compiler and runtime for low-friction deployment of trained models.

Databricks secures $140 million. Unified Analytics Paltform company Databricks announced it has received $140 million in a Series D funding round, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Founded by the team who created Apache Spark, Databricks has raised $247 million to date, and will use the new funds to accelerate the investment in making artificial intelligence achievable for enterprise organizations with its Unified Analytics Platform.

Red Hat, Microsoft simplify containers for hybrid clouds. Red Hat and Microsoft announced an alliance expansion, with a new initiative aimed at enabling enterprises to more easily adopt containers. The companies say this includes "native support for Windows Server containers on Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Microsoft Azure, and SQL Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift."

ORNL readies facility for 200 Petaflop Supercomputer. Oak Ridge National Laboratory is getting a data center ready for its Summit supercomputer, which is expected to deliver 200 petaflops - which is about twice as powerful as the world's current leader in computer performance. The data center includes a new 20 megawatt power and cooling plant and an expanded central energy plant for the campus.

Wednesday, August 02, 2017

Primary Data announced a $40 million funding round and released version 2.0 of its DataSphere software platform.

After receiving an initial $50 million in 2013 the company will use the new funds to continue build out its sales team and business. The $40 million funding was split between $20 million led by Pelion Ventures and a $20 million line of credit.

"Automating data management through an intelligent data fabric that spans different types of storage is critical to enabling enterprises to fully leverage their data while finally solving storage complexity,” said Blake Modersitzki, Managing Director at Pelion Venture Partners. “With DataSphere, Primary Data is leading the industry in bringing intelligence to data management across the enterprise and into the cloud, and we are proud to invest in the transformation Primary Data is delivering for its innovative customers.”
The version 2.0 release of DataSphere brings many new features for bringing intelligence into data management. With the selection of data objectives the new release now provides deep control capabilities with Objective Expressions. DataSphere says version 2 enables parallel performance and support for multiple clouds, and adds support for SMB 2.1 and 3.1, as well as Active Directory. Chief Scientist for Primary Data Steve Wozniak said, “DataSphere 2.0 makes it simple for enterprises to finally automate how data is managed by using the intelligence that has been sitting right there in your metadata all along.”Primary Data also noted that it continues to expand its partnerships with Amazon AWS, Cloudian, Google, Scality, NetApp and VMware to help joint customers get the right data to the right place at the right time.Primary Data was recently listed in the Gartner 2017 Hype Cycle for Storage Technologies.

Tuesday, August 01, 2017

FORTRUST acquired by Iron Mountain. For approximately $128 million Iron Mountain (NYSE: IRM) has acquired Denver data center business FORTRUST. Iron Mountain president and CEO William L. Meaney said, “We continue to see opportunities to expand our business through strong organic growth, new development and acquisition. Together with our existing data centers and completion of the first phase of our Northern Virginia data center campus next month, this acquisition will strengthen the foundation of a long-term growth engine and help accelerate the growth in our Adjacent Businesses.”

Cray partners with Seagate for ClusterStor. The two companies have agreed to offload the Seagate ClusterStor HPC array product line to Cray for an undisclosed amount. Cray will continue to support and enhance the product line and to support customers going forward. Cray said it looks to add more than 100 Seagate employees and contractors as a part of the deal. "In 2012 Cray became our first OEM and has continued over the years to be our largest and most strategic ClusterStor partner. Today’s announcement is really the perfect evolution of that continuing, special partnership in HPC," said Ken Claffey, vice president and general manager, Storage Systems Group at Seagate.

Red Hat acquires Permabit assets. Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) announced that it has acquired Permabit Technology (the assets and technology anyway). Permabit is a software provider of data reduction technologies such as deduplication, compression and thin provisioning. Red Hat also recently won two CODiE awards: one for Red Hat 3scale API Management and one for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

Azuqua nets $10.8 million. In a series B round led by Insight Venture Partners cloud application connectivity provider Azuqua received $10.8 million to scale sales, marketing and engineering teams. The Seattle based startup says it looks to connect "business functions and SaaS apps across organizations, automating and radically increasing productivity in mission-critical processes by connecting information across departments such as marketing, finance, sales, and operations.

Thursday, May 11, 2017

Between company conference season and a lot of M&A activity recently, it is hard to keep up with the news. Here are a few things I found interesting:

Facebook breaks ground on 1M sq ft Altoona data center. Because Iowa is the best place for data centers.... Facebook broke ground on its fourth building in Altoona - a 1 million square foot data center. With this building the Facebook data center campus will total 2.5 million square feet.

Cisco acquires AI company MindMeld. Just like many years ago when you had to keep a running list of who Cisco was buying, they are keeping a fast pace in 2017. Making it their third acquisition in two weeks Cisco dives deeper into AI by buying MindMeld, a San Francisco company that has developed a conversational platform based on natural language understanding (NLU). The NLU functionality will be integrated with Cisco's Spark platform. MindMeld, besides being on my own 'cool tech' list, has been recognized as one of the top companies leading the AI revolution.

Wednesday, May 03, 2017

Shaw explores selling ViaWest: Sources 'familiar with the matter' say that Canadian cable company Shaw Communications is exploring options for selling ViaWest. Shaw bought ViaWest three years ago for $1.2 billion.

iRobot: Vacuuming up Microservices on AWS. I like cloud architecture stories. This one just spoke to me -- about microservices and modern applications and services. "Ben Kehoe, Cloud Robotics Research Scientist at iRobot, explains how they built a serverless solution to power microservices that scale to control millions of robots. You’ll learn how they automate and optimize AWS Lambda function and Amazon API Gateway deployments with AWS CloudFormation and Swagger, plus how they inject information during the deployment process to decouple architecture details from the code."

Will Molten Silicon make Lithium-Ion 'Uneconomic'? Australian company 1414 says it has developed a molten silicon thermal energy storage system (TESS) that can store 500 kilowatt-hours of energy within a 70-centimeter cube. At 36x the capacity of a 14 kilowatt hour Tesla Powerwall 2 the company says it could build a 10 megawatt-hour plant for around AUD $700,000 (USD $528,000), or a tenth of the price of a Tesla battery-based project.

Path to Exascale. At a user forum U.S. Exascale Computing Project (ECP) director Paul Messina outlined the accelerated timetable with delivery of the first exascale machine now scheduled for 2021. The ECP is a collaborative effort of two U.S. Department of Energy organizations, the Office of Science (DOE-SC) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Megaport launches Exchange. Elastic interconnectivity and global SDN company Megaport launched its Megaport Exchange, a marketplace "designed to connect our rich Ecosystem of providers to our global network of customers." The relatively young Australian company has built a network of 150 global locations, and the marketplace connects customers to cloud service providers, data center operators and Network and Managed Service Providers.

DataStation - intersection on the power grid. My interest in the modular data center concept and application is refreshed. BaseLayer + Phoenix Salt River Project = DataStation and a new approach to delivering compute power right next to the power grid.

Synack nets $21.25M investment. Hacker-powered security platform provider Synack announced it has raised $21.25 million in a series C round of funding led by Microsoft Ventures. HPE and Singtel Innov8 also participated in the round. The funding will allow the company to further develop its platform and scale adoption globally.

Pure Storage launches FlashArray//X. All-flash data platform vendor PureStorage announced its first all-NVMe enterprise-class all-flash array, the Flash Array//X. The new array features DirectFlash Software, DirectFlash modules for communication and //X70 Controllers. The company says the end-to-end "software-to-raw flash optimization reduces latency by up to 50 percent, and increase write bandwidth by up to 2x and performance density by up to 4x."

Tegile closes $33M funding. Flash storage provider Tegile announced it has closed on $33 million in additional funding. Led by Western Digital and other current investors, the company will use the funds to further invest in technology development and product innovation, as well as expand worldwide market reach.

Cisco launches next gen storage networking innovations. Cisco launched a number of new storage networking offerings Tuesday - ranging from Fibre Channel Switching Modules to new HBA support on cisco UCS and NVMe support over fibre channel on UCS C-Series and MDS storage directors.

Friday, March 03, 2017

C3 IoT updates platform, adds machine learning, closes new financing. It was a big week for enterprise Internet of Things company C3 IoT. The company announced "Version 7 of its enterprise software platform for big data, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and Internet of Things (IoT) applications, with new tools and enhancements." The new edition will be out Q1 2017 and feature advanced capabilities spanning five elements of the C3 IoT Platform – data science tools, artificial intelligence algorithms, application development tools, edge analytics, and platform administration. On Thursday C3 IoT said that it has raised a Series E financing round at a $1.4 billion pre-money valuation, led by Breyer Capital.

Faction granted patent for work on hybrid and multi-cloud networking. Enterprise-class IaaS cloud provider Faction announced that it has been awarded USPTO Patent #9,571,301 for its hybrid and multi-cloud technology. This technology powers its Faction Cloud Bloc and Faction Internetwork eXhange (FIX) product sets. Faction says its patent details how physical resources that may be hosted within a data center or colocation site can connect to one or more cloud providers a creating seamless, single pool of resources. The Denver based company, formerly known as Peak, also raised $11 million earlier this year to continue growing the company.

Nimble introduces Multicloud storage service. Nimble announced Cloud Volumes, an easy to manage multi-cloud storage service that lets an enterprise use public cloud for compute and Nimble Cloud Volumes for storage capacity. Nimble explains that data protection is flexible and cost effective, as customers only pay for changed data, not for additional full copies.

Asetek signs product development agreement. Liquid cooling company Asketek announced that it has signed with a 'major player in the data center space' for a development agreement that has been in the works for several years. Asetek says the goal of the agreement is to have "products in the market before year-end and resulting revenue to have significant impact on Asetek's future data center business."

Thursday, January 26, 2017

Cisco to acquire AppDynamics. Cisco announced its intent to acquire Application Intelligence software provider AppDynamics for $3.7 billion. AppDynamics was on the cusp of filing an IPO when Cisco scooped them up for almost twice their value. Cisco saysIAAS that AppDynamics CEO David Wadhwani will continue lead the new software business unit within the company.

Faction nets $11 million funding round. IaaS cloud provider Faction announced it has closed an $11 million funding round from investors to fuel company growth and meet ever-expanding customer demand. The Denver based formerly known as PeakColo had a successful year of growth in 2016, and launched its Internetwork eXchange (FIX) solution, which enables enterprises to connect private cloud and colocation resources into public clouds privately and securely.

Hyper.sh aims to be the new IaaS. Forbes has an excellent article on Hyper - a New York startup company looking to disrupt IaaS with its HyperContainer, a convergence of containers and VMs.

D-Wave announces 2000Q Quantum Computer. D-Wave Systems announced the commercial availability of its 2000Q quantum computer, and first customer of the new system, Temporal Defense Systems. After launching 10 years ago D-Wave says the new 2000Q is 1,000 times faster than the previous generation system it released in 2015. The company says it is the only company with a product designed to run quantum computing problems - with its 'quantum processing units (QPUs)'. D-Wave benchmark tests revealed that its QPUs outperformed classical algorithms by 1,000 to 10,00 times in pure computation time, and that the 2000Q system outperformed the GPU-based implementations by 100 times in equivalent problem solving performance per watt.

Thursday, December 29, 2016

Inside Amazon Hyperscale. I am a little behind - but catching up on watching AWS re:Invent talks from the event last month. I think the world of AWS VP James Hamilton, and his talk at the event about the inner workings of AWS data center operations is absolutely fascinating. Putting the hyper in hyperscale, James talks about all of the components of their data center architecture, innovation and the things one can do when your unit of measure is in a category of its own. Global network details, 100 waves @ 100G, 32MW data centers with 50-80k servers each, making their own network and compute hardware, machine learning, and just how their massive scale came into being for the cloud giant. Watch the video... or catch up on a much better article on it at Data Center Frontier.

Number of hyperscale data centers reach 300. Citing research from Synergy Research Group CBR reports that the number of hyper scale data centers is expected to reach the 300 mark this month. The report analyzed the data center footprint of major cloud providers and internet service companies. With an average of 13 data center sites each the U.S. accounted for 45% of the number and China and Japan following at 8% and7% respectively.

OneWeb raises $1.2B for satellite-based internet. The race to deliver satellite-powered internet is moving fast. After Tesla asked for permission to launch satellites, OneWeb has raised $1.2 billion to fund a "high volume satellite production facility" that will hopefully produce 15 satellites each week.

Wednesday, December 07, 2016

Equinix buys Verizon data centers. I 'think' I saw this one coming... but the biggest player in the industry just got bigger. Just 5 years after Verizon paid $1.4 billion to acquire Terremark, it has sold 24 data centers to Equinix for $3.6 billion. It seems hard to top this asset sale, but I guess we'll see what 2017 brings. I liked Equinix co-founder Jay Adelson's link to the 1998 story about Equinix as a Cisco-backed upstart.

HPE and Schneider Electric partner on Micro Data Centers. HP Enterprise and Schneider are partnering to deliver a complete pre-fab solution for drop-in-place modular data center. I always liked the previous respective versions of a modular solution that were offered, but this partnership makes sense (targeting the edge and IoT, etc). Bonus points for not referencing the solution as a 'virtual data center'. Last week Schneider launched the next generation of its EcoStruxure architecture and platform.

Cray and Microsoft partner for deep learning. At the 2016 Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Conference this week Cray announced the results of a deep learning collaboration between Cray, Microsoft, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) that expands the horizons of running deep learning algorithms at scale using the power of Cray supercomputers. Research at CSCS utilizes the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit on a Cray XC50 with more than 1,000 NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU accelerators.

Dell EMC and VMware launch new Hyper-converged systems.Powered by VMware Cloud Foundation Dell launched the VxRack SDDC as a turnkey hyper-converged solution for both traditional and cloud-native workloads. The total lifecycle offering is built on Dell PowerEdge servers and VMware infrastructure software (vSAN, vSphere, and NSX) and VMware SDDC Manger.

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Green500 List of energy-efficient supercomputers. Almost as fun as the Top500 list itself. The Green500 ranks supercomputers by how energy-efficient they are. NVIDIA Corporation took the top spot with 9,462.09 MFLOPS per Watt with their DGX-1 system, using their P100 Tesla GPUs.

Spray-on concrete for EMP shielding. This just sounds cool. A team from the University of Nebraska has created a cost-effective concrete mix that acts as a shield against "intense pulses of electromagnetic energy".

About Me

John Rath is a veteran IT professional and regular contributor at Data Center Knowledge. He has served many roles in the data center, including support, system administration, web development and facility management. John started a data center links news site in 2006 and has since authored numerous blog posts, magazine articles and white papers on a variety of data center topics.